The "Missing Link"

As I mentioned in my last post, I came across Tom Bertrand’s YouTube video “The ‘Missing Link’ to Ben Hogan’s Secret” while browsing golf videos. He has another one, “The SECRET to Ben Hogan’s ‘laying off the club’.” Experimenting with this tip made me feel uncomfortable, and I haven’t adopted it yet (you’ll see my comments to Tom on his video), but the “Missing Link” is very powerful. See it for yourself. Then go to his book—it’s interesting to read this side-by-side with Hogan’s book. When I started re-reading The Secret of Hogan's Swing, I happened to notice what Tom says about both arms.

In his chapter, “The Technology of Hogan’s Secret,” Tom describes the role of the arms this way.

The arms have the critical task of bringing the hands into the impact zone precisely every time. They must work together, and the only way they can work together is to actively set them up with the elbows turned inward toward each other.

Hogan dictates this more emphatically

The upper part of the arms should be pressed very tightly against the sides of the chest. In my own case, I consciously work to build up so strong an adhesion between the upper arms and the chest that a person would have to exert a really terrific amount of force to wedge them apart.

When I tried to swing with my arms tightly connected, I did feel that it could lead to more power, but so far I haven’t isolated this arm connection enough. I’ve been more concerned with the elbow turn. That seemed like such a crucial factor that I directed most of my attention to it.

For this, we have to depend on The Secret of Hogan's Swing, since, as Tom explains, “Hogan never mentioned it in his books.” Hogan did reveal this “secret” to John Schlee, who, in turn, taught it to Tom. I could have saved myself a lot of time if I had come across Tom’s explanation earlier. Without it, I took Hogan’s talk about supination and pronation and thought that the hands do this. The result was that I had a “handsy” (to use Tom’s term) swing in the impact zone. Sometimes I hit the ball the way I wanted to, and sometimes I didn’t. I never knew what was going to happen, but I attributed this to lack of practice. I assumed the action of the hands was extremely difficult to learn and that years of practice would be required. That prospect was discouraging, yet I still drew hope from the occasional good swings I could make.

That’s why I instinctively knew that Tom had to be correct when I saw him demonstrate the left elbow turn in his YouTube video about the “Missing Link.” In the video, Tom concentrates on the hitting area “where the left elbow comes into play” and goes into greater detail here than he does in his book. You can read two sections in the book “The Left Elbow” (p. 121) and “The Missing Link to Hogan’s Secret” (pp. 148-151). However, to understand this fully, I recommend studying the video. As an aside, Tom believes in plenty of slow motion swing practice and plenty of practice in general, conclusions I come to share in my own swing development.

I also took encouragement from Tom’s introduction to the last section of his book, “The Legendary Golf System,” where he presents

a complete and final summation of all the key elements of Hogan’s golf swing, arranged in a simple format that the average golfer can understand, use, and enjoy.

This training program takes a bit of practice to work effectively, but it’s not so daunting when you realize that in a matter of weeks, you can learn and apply to your game the secrets that took Hogan at least forty years of steady digging to discover. As I [Bertrand] began to comprehend and apply the depth of Hogan’s hard-won wisdom to my own game, I felt as it someone had handed me a big bag of gold nuggets and said, “Here’s all you need to buy your ticket to golfer’s heaven.

I’m not so sure you can learn the secrets in “a matter of weeks,” but I am quite sure that Tom is correct in the rest of what he says. Without Hogan’s book and without Tom’s system, learning a good golf swing could easily take any of us at least forty years. Finally, I’ve found a complete teaching system that I understand and that can probably be achieved in a reasonable amount of time. How I practiced from this point on will be the subject of my next post.